No sooner had Bush announced that the United States was at war on terrorism than it became Feith's job to come up with a strategy for executing such a war.
"We said to ourselves, 'We are at war with an international terrorist network that includes organizations, state supporters and nonstate supporters. What does that mean to be at war with a network?' " Feith said in an interview.
Douglas J. Feith wanted a more hard-line alternative.
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But Feith felt he needed to bring on help in the Pentagon for another reason, too, said four other senior current and former Pentagon civilians: the belief that the CIA and other intelligence agencies dangerously undervalued threats to U.S. interests.
"The strategic thinking was the Middle East is going down the tubes. It's getting worse, not better," said one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely with Feith's offices. "I don't think we thought there was objective evidence that could be got from CIA, DIA, INR," he added, referring to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's main intelligence office, and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
Feith's office worked not only on "how to fight Saddam Hussein but also how to fight the NSC, the State Department and the intelligence community," which were not convinced of Hussein's involvement in terrorism, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Feith set up the first of his two shops, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, to "study al Qaeda worldwide suppliers, chokepoints, vulnerabilities and recommend strategies for rendering terrorist networks ineffective," according to a January 2002 document sent to DIA.
The group never grew larger than two people, said Feith and William J. Luti, who was director of the Office of Special Plans and deputy undersecretary of defense for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs.
The evaluation group's largest project was what one participant called a "sociometric diagram" of links between terrorist organizations and their supporters around the world, mostly focused on al Qaeda, the Islamic Resistance Movement (or Hamas), Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. It was meant to challenge the "conventional wisdom," said one senior defense official, that terrorist groups did not work together.
It looked "like a college term paper," said one senior Pentagon official who saw the analysis. It was hundreds of connecting lines and dots footnoted with binders filled with signals intelligence, human source reporting and even thirdhand intelligence accounts of personal meetings between terrorists.
One of its key and most controversial findings was that there was a connection between secular states and fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups such as al Qaeda.
If anything, the analysis reinforced the view of top Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul N. Wolfowitz and Feith, that Hussein's Iraq had worrisome contacts with al Qaeda over the last decade that could only be expected to grow.
The evaluation group's other job was to read through the huge, daily stream of intelligence reporting on terrorism and "highlight things of interest to Feith," said one official involved in the process. "We were looking for connections" between terrorist groups.
From time to time, senior defense officials called bits of intelligence to the attention of the White House, they said.
Feith said the worldwide threat study itself never left the Pentagon. It helped inform the military strategy on the war on terrorism, but it was only one small input into that process, he said.
